Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Ultima: Warriors of Destiny (NES, 1991)

This is Ultima V's ill-recieved NES port. The PC version of Ultima V is debatably the best game in the series, a game that is critically acclaimed to this day. Yet this is easily the worst of the console ports, nearly to the point of unplayability.

The game begins with a series of questions that determine your alignment with the various virtues (honesty, courage, and so forth). This gives you your stats; your class, if you will.

As far as difficult choices go, these are fairly mundane. Most of them consist of whether or not to stand up for yourself.

How does one "mistakenly" believe they slew a dragon? That lord is full of shit!

The Avatar, hero of the land. Much like the movie Avatar, he's blue.

 Those three shapes reminds me of the Advocacy from the War of the Worlds show.


NO! THEY KILLED SHAMINO! Alien sons of bitches! You take that back! Well, no... they blasted him, but our hero managed to carry him to safety while wondering who these nefarious new foes are.

 Seems Lord British has disappeared. And taking up the mantle of rulership is the completely not-ominous Blackthorn. He then immediately turns evil and starts ruling with an iron fist. Just like that? I figured they'd milk this for a little bit. It turns out that the three shadowy figures are manipulating him, and they then proceed to turn the entire land against our hero through propaganda. Even shopkeepers and townspeople are his foes this time around. Now that's a story!

 And then... the game begins. looks very PC. For whatever reason, they completely threw out the Dragon Warrior clone motif of Exodus and Quest of the Avatar.

Oddly, there's no real character creation here. You get your stats from those questions at the beginning, and that's it. I have no idea what kinds of powers I have right off the bat. To make things worse, the game drops me in the middle of a field with no clue where to go. So I roam around...

...OH SHIT I WALKED OVER A PUDDLE. You can hardly even see these things! What gives? On the bright side, they do waaaay less damage than in Exodus.

Here's the equipment screen. There are a lot of items to start, but the game hasn't given me any real clue what they're for. Some of them are spell reagents, I believe.

I found a hut with an NPC inside! ...but I can't seem to talk to him. Matter of fact, I can't seem to talk to about 75% of the NPCs I encounter. Maybe this version of the game is bugged, hard to say. It's so borderline unplayable either way that I can't tell.

The main thing that makes it unplayable is the movement. It's jerky. You move one space at a time, slowly.

This game lacks the dialogue options of a modern RPG, to say the least. You can either ask the NPC for a handie work or you can leave.

Using the Sextant, which I got from asking one NPC some questions, causes the world to change. Now I can see teleportation gates strewn about the field while I wander around slowly and carefully avoid puddles.

...what's a Sextant?

FINALLY, enemies. I can't figure out how to actually fight back, so my characters get stomped. This is the NES version, how can it be hard to figure out how to do something? There are only four buttons!

Die and you reappear at Lord British. He doesn't have much to say in terms of where I should be going. Wait, I thought he was missing? I guess this is merely an image of him, like Dr. Light in the Mega Man X series. I wonder if he'll give our hero some dash boots so I can stop moving one space at a time.

Lord British's Castle doesn't have much to see either. I figured this would be a dark necropolis of evil by now with Blackthorne occupying the Iron Throne, but I guess not.

Item shops are full of spell reagents. Even though I haven't figured out how to cast a spell yet, I buy some Garlic to ward off vampires. Also, Shamino is a notorious pothead who might get the munchies.

A graveyard? Whoa. If this were a Zelda, I'd push on all the gravestones. There's no real sense of anything hidden in this game, though. It all just feels like I'm wandering through empty space.

I park the heroes on a pier, and that'll do it. I never even really got off the ground with this one because I simply couldn't find anything to do, and when I finally encountered enemies I couldn't press a button to attack them. I think you need to select the sword (with select) and then put the crosshairs over an enemy and press another button, but I couldn't figure out what before the battle was over.

In closing, I'm not sure if my version of the game was bugged or not (due to not being able to talk to most NPCs or attack). Either way, this game is ponderous, slow, and boooooring. The framerate, at least on the NES, is pretty bad, and the environments are extremely generic. I'm guessing it's a better experience to play the PC version with a guide on hand and a lot of time. Looking forward to checking out the far more basic Ultima: Runes of Virtue games on the Game Boy.

Other NES Ultima Games:
Ultima: Warriors of Destiny


  1. How does one "mistakenly" believe they slew a dragon? That lord is full of shit!

    The A-button choice on the "do you accept your Lord's false accusation Q?" seems so Japanese.


    ^the greatest

  2. That was AWFUL. A good look at it, but what a game.